Publishing in academia can be a scramble. If you’re working on a “hot” topic, then there’s a demand to get your results out before someone else does it first. That’s not a good reason to rush a manuscript, or to submit an article to a publication just because it has a faster turnaround time, but it does add a sense of urgency (and sometimes that’s a good thing). This is publish or perish in action. Continue reading “3 Reasons to Post on arXiv”→

Did you know that MATLAB has a Variables Window? It does, though the documentation does an excellent job of not saying much about it (searching within the documentation got me nothing but a search engine got me to this helpful page). I’m guilty of giving introductory workshops without mentioning the Variables Window. I never would have talked about it until after one workshop there was a student asking a question and I opened the Variables window to help. The student thought it was very useful but they were surprised because they had never seen the window before. I assumed that this was because they were new to MATLAB. Continue reading “Did You Know that MATLAB has a Variables Window?”→

Have you ever been to Frankfurt? I’ve had the pleasure of visiting Frankfurt a few times, albeit usually just through the airport. It’s the first city where I stayed in a Doppelzimmer mit Frühstück (double room with breakfast). Frankfurt is also the name of a popular theme in the LaTeX document class Beamer, which is used for making presentations (not coincidentally, Beamer is the German word for projector).Continue reading “How to Quickly Change Beamer Colors”→

Welcome to the first post on Rambling Academic. As a warning, this blog won’t be very academic (but it will be about academic things!). I also might not ramble very much. So, what’s in it for you, dear reader? If you engage in research in any way, then you should find something useful here. If you’re interested in reading about the nuts and bolts of research, then I’m talking (and listening) to you. Continue reading “Opening Act of Rambling Academic”→